Everything Leads to You

“So that’s how he knew my name,” Ava says.

“No. She didn’t tell him. She was upset about seeing him. It was just too much for her. It’s hard to believe, but it was the first time they ever met. He explained it to us that day. He and Caroline’s mom had a fling—it only lasted a week or two—and he didn’t even know she was pregnant until a mutual friend told him. Until Caroline found that letter when she was about eleven, she didn’t have any idea who her dad might have been; and then when she did find out, her mom polluted her mind with these accusations: He was fame-obsessed. He would never admit that Caroline was his. The money he sent was to pay them to keep their mouths shut. I guess it was her word against Clyde’s, but the man I met that day didn’t seem like any of the things Valerie made him out to be. He seemed sad and lost and a little bit desperate. But Caroline didn’t know how to react to everything. She didn’t tell him what she was planning to name you. She hardly said anything.

“He knew your name because he found me somehow. I got a call from him one night, just a couple weeks after you were born. He wanted to know about you, but mostly he wanted your name. I told him Ava Garden and he laughed. He said something like, ‘Caroline is more like me than she would like to believe,’ which I chose to interpret as a comment about family and rejection. That she would prefer to invent a last name than to carry one on. That all of them were rootless—Clyde and Valerie and Caroline and now Ava. Clyde was raised by relatives, you know. An aunt and uncle for a while, a grandmother, passed back and forth in this big family.”

“I didn’t know that,” Ava says. “He mentioned that he was an orphan in the letter, but I didn’t know the specifics.”

I did know it, though, and I don’t know why I hadn’t thought to mention it before.

“Yeah,” he says. “A lot of people theorize that that’s why he was so private. I was always touched by that, though. That he would just want your name.”

“It was for a bank account,” Ava says.

Lenny looks surprised, but then he shakes his head.

“Maybe he wanted to know for the account, but he also wanted to know just to know. Believe me. I could hear it in his voice. I never told Caroline about that call. She thought that meeting him had been a mistake and she was spinning out of control. The guy who got her pregnant was just a one-night stand, so she was on her own and she was scared.”

He looks stricken for a moment.

“I hope you weren’t hoping to find your father,” he says. “Caroline never knew his last name but she wouldn’t have tried to find him anyway.”

“Why not?” Ava asks.

“It just wasn’t like that. Caroline chose him for a good time one night, not to be a father to her child. And then we were sort of together by the time we met Clyde. I was never into the kind of life she led. Drugs didn’t sit that well with me. To be honest, they fucked me up, and not in the intended way. But I would have done anything for Caroline and it was beginning to seem like the only way I could be with her was to live her kind of life. So I did, for a little while. And then one day . . .”

He turns his chair away from us, toward his majestic view, but he’s hunched forward the way people are when they’re about to pass out and someone tells them to put their head between their knees. After a while he turns back around to face us.

“Look,” he says. “Whoo! I just gotta say this. I’ve been carrying this thing around with me for years. For all your life. Holy shit. Okay.”